If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps drawing and visualizing can help science students enhance their learning potential.

Felice Frankel, a senior research fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University who holds a concurrent appointment as a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is exploring this idea through the Picturing to Learn program, which encourages students to create drawings from the concepts they learn from lectures.

For many students, thinking visually and trying to draw for the purposes of communication can highlight areas of confusion, Frankel explained. “The important caveat is for the ‘purpose of communication.’ The challenge is to represent an idea, to tell a story, or explain it to someone else.”

To Frankel, whose work has centered on the visual expression of science for 14 years, visual thinking is one of the keys to holistic understanding of any concept. “It is how I learn,” she said.

Frankel noticed that others felt the same way. When she spoke with researchers or professors about their work, they would use paper and pencil to explain their ideas. Perhaps if drawing helped in explanation, it might also help in learning, she thought.

Frankel, who has tested her idea with colleagues Joanne Larrabee and Rebecca Rosenberg in teacher workshops and in classes at MIT, has been encouraged by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue expanding the Picturing to Learn program. She plans to outline the program’s future by submitting a proposal to NSF in January 2007. The proposal will include an expansion of the program to classes at Harvard University and the designing of professional development courses.

Visual Chemistry

Frankel first developed Picturing to Learn, which was piloted in 2003 with a $100,000 grant from the NSF, in a small materials science class of 20 students at MIT. She then expanded the program to a chemistry class of 500 first-year students taught by Donald Sadoway, MIT’s John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry.

Sadoway asked his students to create drawings that explained and compared molecular bonds in compounds with different boiling points. The students were encouraged to explain physical features such as molecular size and electron configuration to account for the forces at work within and between molecules.

Many of the students found creative ways to explore the questions. They drew animals, spaceships, and people in place of molecules. They also used metaphors; for example, the students related the ways keys fit into locks and the heel heights of shoes to the way compounds interact. The students examined concepts in a new way, Sadoway explained, but “they had to pick their metaphors carefully. Some did not work.”

For some students, the assignment highlighted a failure to see the whole picture. While students can memorize equations and correctly answer quantitative test questions, it is far more important that they develop a deeper conceptual understanding, which was an intended outcome of the picturing exercises, Sadoway said.

The exercise was also an eye-opener for Sadoway. “By studying the drawings of students who answered incorrectly, I was able to zoom in on the precise nature of their misunderstanding. On this basis, I have learned how to revise the way I teach this topic,” he said.

For More Information

Interested teachers should visit http://web.mit.edu/i-m/picturing for more details about the Picturing to Learn program.